Coffee to Become More Expensive As Brooklyn Roasters Raise Prices (Waterworld Approacheth)

A couple of weeks ago, the deli/grocery closest to the L’s office announced, by taping up an apologetic laserjet-printed sign, that a large coffee would henceforth cost $1.50. I didn’t blog about it then, because really now. But I should have, apparently: the Brooklyn Paper‘s Aaron Short reports that, indeed, coffee prices are going up all over the borough: Porto Rico Coffee Roasters, in Williamsburg, and Gillies Coffee, in Park Slope, two wholesalers who supply many restaurants and coffee shops in the borough, are raising their prices.

This is attributable, apparently, to price increases from foreign suppliers—partly due to the weak dollar, or supply and demand, or other factors your libertarian friend would be only too happy to explain to you some time—and partly due to increasing demand from the growing middle classes of countries like China, India and Brazil.

It’s the growing middle class (in countries where the middle class is growing), Gillies Coffee President Donald Schoenholt explains to Short: “’The first thing that a growing middle class wants to do is smoke Marlboros, wear Levis and drink coffee,'” he said, apparently confusing “growing middle class” with “East Berlin” or possibly “the characters in The Outsiders.”

You should probably begin hoarding in preparation for the global shortage, then. Assuming you have any room in your bunker in between the bottled water and Ragu.